


strange is the call

by sunflowerbright



Category: Spartacus Series (TV), Spartacus: Blood and Sand, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, Spartacus: Vengeance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Barca and Pietros joins the Rebellion, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, General Warnings for a lot of stuff that happens on the show, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-28
Updated: 2013-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-27 20:37:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/983332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowerbright/pseuds/sunflowerbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It almost ends with Spartacus. It almost ends with rain</p>
<p>almost</p>
            </blockquote>





	strange is the call

 

 

When it happens, it happens quickly and without thought: killing is what they do, after all.

_”Spartacus shows the way!”_ he hears Crixus say, conviction in his voice, and Barca thinks, _yes._

He still doesn’t quite feel free.

*

 

That’s not how it _starts_ , of course. How it starts is with a young serving boy, or perhaps with a young soldier of Carthage, too proud for his own good, too _angry_ certainly, taking on Rome and thinking there will be no consequences.

But while Pietros has heard the tales of that in snippets, whispered when Barca was drunk enough to share, or the few times the shadows in his eyes became too much for him to bear alone, he has not really lived it himself.

So for him it starts in the _ludus,_ and it starts with fear: but most importantly, it starts with two dark, intent eyes following him all day long, trailing behind like he might disappear if the holder of them takes his sight away even for a second.

Pietros risks a glance back only once, and sees a beast of the arena staring back at him.

He feels calm.

Another, almost as tall, with hair the colour of wheat _(Auctus,_ he’ll learn later, the man’s name is Auctus), digs his elbow into the side of the man looking at Pietros, and mutters something, loud enough for him to hear most, of _’pretty, but so young his balls has barely dropped yet’_ , and he quickly looks away again.

The other man looks away too. Pietros feels strangely bare without those eyes on him.

It’s the very next day when he’s reaching for something on a shelf that’s too high even for him (and Pietros is already surprisingly tall), and suddenly there’s a warm, huge body pressed against his back, and he almost yelps, but he keeps back the sound at the last second, because one cannot show weakness in this _ludus_ , it is not safe, and then the pressure is gone, and Pietros turns around to see the huge man from yesterday handing him the jar he was reaching for.

“Is this it?” he asks, and his voice is deep and dark, and his eyes are surprisingly gentle.

“Um…” he feels heat flood his face, and surely some of it must come from the pure _warmth_ that this man radiates, as if he is shedding it off him like a second skin: Pietros remembers being told by the cook that the country this one hails from is always warm, as if the sun has its eye on it always, has moved closer on purpose, to gaze upon its wonders.

Rome must be cold for him.

And then he _smiles_ , in the face of Pietros’ awkwardness, and Pietros thinks _oh_.

Their fingers brush when he is handed the jar, and the first thing Pietros does is ask _medicus_ the name of this man.

“That’s Barca,” he is told. “The one always at his side is Auctus.”

Pietros does not care about Auctus; but he comes to care for Barca.

That’s how it starts.

It starts with obvious interest and the breaking of something else, because Auctus’s eyes become withdrawn when he looks at Pietros, when he looks at _Barca_ and Barca’s hands keep being gentle, the few times they brush up against each other, ‘few’ he says, but in truth they are many, considering.

It starts with hushed and angry whispers between them the day before Auctus falls, and Pietros sees it in Barca’s eyes when the gladiators come back to the _ludus_ , and he knows, distant though they may have become _(because of him_ , a voice in his head accuses and he has to shake it off), there was still care and affection there, so when Barca gets drunk to the point of oblivion that same night, Pietros stays away, even though he yearns to do the opposite.

The very next day, Barca sits heavily down beside him, and Pietros tenses when he reaches out, not sure what to expect from such a bold movement compared to the fleeting touches of the past, but it is only warm fingers trailing across the shell of his ear, playing with the curls there, and sliding down his neck, gently settling right where it meets his shoulder. It takes up a lot of space, his large hand; the hold feels possessive, but only outwardly. Pietros thinks he could push the hand away, and Barca would let him without a moment’s hesitation.

He offers a smile, and hopes it is equal parts sadness and hope, because this is how he feels, and Barca looks at him like he is not of this world.

That’s how it starts.

 

 

 

How it almost ends is another matter.

It almost ends with Spartacus. It almost ends with rain – it almost ends with Pietros tripping over his own words, spilling truths _(lies)_ that no-one should hear, and he should have known better than to trust the man before him, the man that’s placed collar around his neck, but he feels invincible in the moment, and he lets his words carry like wind.

It almost ends with a sharp knife in the dark, and it is only halted by a speedy messenger, arriving just a little earlier than what even he intended.

Pietros thinks the gods must have granted the messenger’s horse speed of flight to ensure that Barca does not die: he even thinks this as the gladiator hisses at him, words harsher than they have ever been before, calls him fool and useless and casts him aside.

He feels hollow and numb at Barca’s words, believing them to be truths yet again, but aside from Barca completely ignoring him, nothing changes. There is no violence, no threats, not even curious hands from the other gladiators, usually always so quick to take what pleasure they can find. They stay away from Pietros as they had when he was still Barca’s – maybe he still is. If the man still deigns to protect him.

It takes a week before he is walking down a hall and suddenly yanked into an alcove, tensing only briefly before he is enveloped in warmth, before he recognises hands that are surely too gentle to be wielding weapons every day, and he lets himself relax again, because how could he not?

Barca whispers an apology into his hair, and when Pietros, still feeling the hurt of being cast aside piercing his heart like a splinter, asks him what made him change his mind, Barca huffs out a laugh, and tells him, _I could never leave you._

 

*

 

 

Barca has a laugh like the mountain he is.

He has another that is almost shy, and that Pietros is fairly certain he is the only one to have witnessed: it is short, and he never looks up when it is emitted, clear like crystal bells. It comes out when Pietros gently teases him, which is not often.

There’s the one usually reserved for Crixus and Spartacus now, that he’s heard once in regards to Gannicus, his freed brother, that’s been directed at _Doctore_ and at the new recruits from Germania as well, the two brothers that fight like one and then fight on being divided as well: it is a laugh that would be mocking, would be annoyed at times, if it was not for the undertone of warmth, a current like a sibling being exasperated with their charge, the fondness unyielding but the irritation there.

The laugh Barca makes at tales of his old foolish actions is much darker than that one. Pietros does not like it.

Barca tells him of Cyprian and a mother speared down by Roman soldiers in front of his eyes. He whispers his father’s name in the late, late nights and say, _‘I am the only one left’,_ and doesn’t fall asleep again.

Pietros thinks that Barca has little to laugh for in this world, and yet he does so anyway.

He dares not speak the words, but he knows he is in love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You’re taller than most others, even the soldiers,” Barca mumbles one night. “That can be used to your advantage. Bear down on them from above, but mind not to open yourself to attack. They have reach as well.”

“Barca?”

“I’ve seen you. You’re quick. You know more about weapons than anyone. You know how to handle them. You’ve seen.”

Pietros cards his fingers through Barca’s hair and says nothing: he feels unsettled, frightened. He thinks of blood staining the sand of the arena, and wonders what it would look like on his hands. He thinks of the men he has helped sew up with _Medicus_ , and already knows that the answer to his thoughts does not lie there. It is not the same.

“Duck when you can; you weave yourself back and forth on the training field. It will not be the same, but you can imagine. Do not waste energy parrying every blow. You will need it: you will have to run,” his head is on Pietros’ chest, and he lifts it now, locking their eyes: the term has never been so apt before – Pietros is held in place, unable to look away. Only Barca has the key.

“If it comes down to it,” he says. “Tell me that you will run?”

“From what?” he asks, mouth dry, because the last few minutes feel like a blur already and he has no idea what Barca is talking about.

“I need you to stay alive,” Barca tells him, and they are pressed so close together in the night, that Pietros is not sure which one of them is shaking with fear. He thinks it may be him.

He thinks Barca’s kisses tastes like salt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The truth is this; Barca murdered an innocent young boy, and then lied to Pietros about it. And then almost got himself killed for his lies.

The truth is that the snake in the grass is the vilest of them all, and its residence has been with them for too long.

The truth is that Pietros was born in slavery.

He doesn’t know what it means to be free.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s still blood on Aurelia’s hands.

“Here,” Pietros comes over to her, kneels down and feels like a giant, tiny and trembling as she is beside him: he holds out his own hands, and lets her take the steps, the lead. She reminds him of the pigeons that Barca had taught him to be so careful with, but he had seen her stab a young man to death in cold blood _(a young man who deserved it. they all deserve it)_ , and thinks she is nothing like a caged bird.

Not anymore.

“It’s not exactly clean…” he says, and means the water in the sewers, but it gets the bloodstains off, and her hands are still surprisingly soft under his, despite her weeks of labour. They’re the hands of a Roman, and she curls the tips of her fingers around his darker ones lightly as he lingers, thinking maybe she needs a reassuring touch.

Had things been different, she may have been one of the women they had just slaughtered in the villa only hours ago.

“Your gladiator does not like me, I do not think,” she says, and her voice is soft and shy and timid, and Pietros wonders if he has ever sounded like that, if he still sounds like that. He glances over his shoulder quickly, sees Barca, staring intently at the both of them, something unreadable in his eyes – and Pietros prides himself on usually being quite good at reading him.

“He is a gladiator no longer,” he tells her. “And he is not mine.”

He – they – are not anyone’s. Barca is free.

That’s not what he means when he says it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pietros doesn’t know what it means when Barca kisses him.

He knows that the other man clings to him, on the nights when it gets cold, and on particular others, days Pietros is slowly learning the shape of by the time of the year and the tense spine in Barca’s back – and he knows that Barca’s kisses are hot and devouring and all-encompassing and claiming, and when they’re not they’re gentle and long and slow.

He knows that he sometimes wakes to Barca’s head cradled on his chest, awake for hours. Pietros thinks he’s listening to his heartbeat, keeping awake to have moments with the sound.

He doesn’t know what it means.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I don’t want to run,” Pietros tells Barca when Aurelia dies. He flexes his hands and thinks of too-soft fingers, and Barca reaches out as if to touch him, but he stops himself in the last moment, as if afraid to do so. Pietros doesn’t comment on it. He ignores the dull throb inside of him. “The next time, I want to fight.”

Barca, Pietros thinks, looks at him like he is scared. He has never known Barca to be scared much, and so he does not know what this means now.

“You want to fight?” Barca asks him, and he nods, and blinks and then he’s on the floor, flat on his back which is hurting, a dull throbbing in his head from where he landed. He had not even seen Barca move. He is too slow.

“Then get up and fight,” Barca tells him, but he leaves him there, and does not offer lessons or even a hand to keep steady.

In that moment, Pietros almost hates him.

 

 

 

 

 

They rescue Naevia.

Before that, the days pass in a blur. Pietros falls asleep not far from Barca, every night, but there is distance now. He’s used to waking up with an arm slung over his middle, or a heavy weight on his chest, Barca using him for a pillow. There is none of that now. He is not sure why.

But they do rescue Naevia

Or, the others do. Pietros wishes to come with them, but Barca sits down next to him, their sides pressed tightly together, and tells him not to come.

He still, Pietros thinks, looks scared. He promises he will stay, and hopes for a kiss, something even shared when the guards in the _ludus_ could see, but Barca’s hand merely lingers at the curls by his ear, fingers shifting, warmth filling the spot and then he is gone.

He shivers, in the cold, though the weather is quite warm. He isn’t sure what is happening, and he feels frightened and alone, until Mira sits down beside him one day and asks him for help.

“Lucius is showing me how to fletch arrows,” she says, and Pietros learns as well, hands already quick and fingers nimble after work at the _ludus_ , with the many weapons there. Mira shoots the bow with a precision he has never seen before, and he despairs at his own attempts, hitting within the mark though it does, but then he sees the look in Lucius’ eyes and feels almost proud of himself.

It is an odd feeling. Unfamiliar, though not new. He has known it on the days when he has made Barca laugh or smile in that certain way. He has known it when he worked quick and with great care, helping _medicus_ to save someone’s life. He has never known it for an accomplishment such as this.

_This was made for killing a man,_ Pietros thinks, the sharp arrowhead held between two fingers, and when he looks up he sees Barca watching him, dark and intently, like he had on the first day he saw him.

Pietros looks away. He kills a deer on their hunt not hours later, and late in the evening, Mira slides over next to him and whisper silly stories in his ear until he falls asleep with a laugh on his lips.

He stays with Naevia on the first night she returns, sits beside her and keeping silent vigil over Nasir, close to death.

“It is my fault,” Naevia tells him, her face void of any emotion, but her voice breaks at her own words: when she reaches for his hand, Pietros is surprised, but in a way also thankful. He hopes it is some kind of support – her hold is steady enough that he is fairly certain it is.

When they set the Arena on fire, he is there, and he kisses Barca afterwards, the man covered in sooth and grime, a shallow wound running down his side. He is given a surprised look in return, and for a second he wonders, if this is how it is to be now, if that day really was Barca throwing him aside, but then a large hand is covering his shoulder, and Barca puts his forehead against Pietros’s, eyes closed in serenity, and he feels almost whole again.

Lucius dies, and Chadara, who had been kind to him and did not deserve it, and Pietros is fairly certain that this has been his life for a long, long time, all this death, but it feels different now and he is frightened in a way he has never been before. There are problems even a free man can’t solve alone: he goes to Oenomaus, and is not mocked like he had feared – instead he is handed a sword.

He huddles close to Barca that night, fresh bruises on his form, and asks him a question.

“What was it like to be free? Before Rome?” there is a hitch in breath, but Pietros does not open his eyes to see if his questions has made Barca close up about the few details he shares of his past. If he does not get an answer, he can pretend to fall asleep and claim he does not even remember asking.

“Sometimes,” Barca says, and he sounds almost breathless. “Sometimes I hardly even remember it.”

“And when you do?”

“When I do,” Barca kisses just above his eyebrow, lingering at the soft skin there. “I think of great, wide plains and heat, and my mother’s screams as she was murdered. I remember how much of a fool I was. And I remember birds.”

Pietros blinks. “We had birds in the _ludus_.”

“A faint reminder for me only.”

“Do you wish we had them here now?”

The arms around him go impossibly tighter. “I wish for many things, Pietros. I dream of them in the night, and never as much as when you were from my side.”

He doesn’t know what that means.

“What are they?” he asks, because he wants to know, it is a fair question.

“Many things,” Barca echoes, his voice going lower. “And I wish… Pietros?”

“I am not asleep,” he answers the unspoken question, raised when his eyes had fluttered shut. Barca sighs.

“You should be. The hour grows late.”

Pietros mutters a curse under his breath. “Am I a child now, to have a bedtime?”

The look on Barca’s face is priceless. “No,” he says slowly. “But you are tired. And you must be exhausted after today,” his fingers circle at the edges of a particularly large bruise that Pietros had acquired on his shoulder. Oenomaus still strikes as true as ever.

And so does Naevia, it seems.

Pietros thinks back to a slave-boy who would have done as he was asked now: who would have closed his eyes and prayed for dreams half as good as the feeling of being in Barca’s arms.

He still does not understand what it means to be free, but he still says: “You have not answered my question.”

“I wish for you,” Barca says, and Pietros falls asleep with that thought in his head.

 

 

 

 

_“And your hands?”_

_“Clean. Forever clean, and yours to command.”_

Mira dies on the day that Pietros tells Barca about the lies.

Or rather, Mira’s death causes Pietros to snap, just a little, like a thread being pulled too taut and breaking, and the scars and bruises on his body, the new muscles forming, aren’t going to stop the tears in his eyes when he tells Barca that he knows he murdered a tiny, innocent child.

“I am not a fool,” Pietros tells him and opens veins in his hands as he pulls at the roots and dry branches that will serve as the only burial his friend will ever get. The sharp rocks of the mountain do their trick as well, and he feels sore and raw and torn open from the inside out. It is as dry as the long days before Spartacus made the rain come again, but up here it is cold as anything Pietros has ever experienced and he spares a thought to Barca, unsuited and hateful of the temperature.

But he is angry, and he does not wish to have his mind occupied with worry and love for this man, this murderer, who _lied to him_ , and he cannot…

“Pietros,” Naeva sits down beside him, worry on her face like grey clouds gathering on a beautiful sky. There are constellations in her eyes, and it takes a while for him to realise that it is because she is crying too.

“The people we are fighting for are also the people they have slayed in the Arena,” is what she says to him, and it makes little sense to him, until he thinks of the few times he went there himself, to the old one and the new one _(the one burned to cinders, now)_ , and had felt horrified.

There’d been a thrill as well, and it had been great and unimaginable, even secondhand. He could hardly imagine what it had been like for the victor on the sands.

“They don’t send children into the Arena,” he tells her, and Naevia smiles sadly.

“We were all of us children.”

It does not make it alright, he thinks, knows, deep in his bones. None of it is alright.

And he doesn’t understand. He feels even more out of his depth than ever. He doesn’t _understand_ the man he loves, and that cannot be right.

“I don’t understand why you lied to me,” is all he ends up saying, when Glaber has been slain. They are still covered in blood from the fight, and Barca is looking at his arm worriedly: Pietros remembers a Roman getting too close, too lucky, and slicing at the tendons in his arm before he managed to cut his head off. He can hardly even feel the pain.

“Why I…” Barca’s eyes lift to his, and Pietros suddenly feels bone-achingly tired, the sword in his hand too heavy for a mere servant like him.

Still a servant. Still a fool of desire, a slave to the whims of this… beast before him.

“Why didn’t you just tell me about the boy? It is not as if it matters.” Of course it matters: it matters that a young life was taken, even if it was the life of someone who might one day grow up to be one of the countless oppressors that has landed him here in the first place. Pietros doesn’t _belong here_ , not covered in gore and blood and with a sword in his hand, and he didn’t belong in the _ludus_ either. He was meant for somewhere else entirely, and people like that boy’s entire family took it from him before he was even born.

He knows all too well that you cannot punish people for something they have not even done yet: so of course, it matters.

“Pietros,” Barca’s voice is low and soft and almost pleading, and Pietros feels even more confused now. “I didn’t want you to carry that burden with me. I never meant for you to know.”

His head is reeling. “So you did it for me?”

Barca frowns at him, and then licks his lips, almost nervously. Pietros wonders if he can taste the blood.

“I am not a coward,” Barca says, and what an odd way to start a sentence, with a statement that Pietros knows only too well. “But I am not above admitting to fear.”

“Fear of what?” he is so, so tired. He is tired of pulling truths out of this man, one long haul after another, never quite managing to catch all the ends of the fraying rope. He wonders which one of them will fall when it finally snaps.

Barca touches him, fingers grazing the skin right above the wound on his arm, and Pietros suddenly feels grounded. He is not sure if it is the touch or the look in Barca’s eyes that does it.

He thinks he has never been so warm before.

“Would you turn from me?” Barca whispers. Pietros doesn’t understand. “If you knew of all the things I have done? There are more, Pietros. It is not just that young boy. Batiatus was a cruel man, and he had slaves to command towards that cruelty as he saw fit. Don’t answer,” he says when Pietros opens his mouth. He withdraws his hand, slowly, regretfully, almost. “I know it already. You already have turned from me. And I have never felt more regret in my life.”

“Never?” the words slip out before he can stop them, because Barca has told him enough about the pains of his life that Pietros can hardly fathom what he has just been told.

The look in Barca’s eyes is an apology, and despite his words, it is him that turns to leave.

 

 

 

Pietros has never understood.

Has never understood why Barca would turn from an equal lover and to him instead. Has never understood why he is still with him, when he could have so many others.  Pietros has never understood what the deep and hungry kisses meant, or why he is being held close at night, and not turned away as soon as pleasure had been taken. He has never understood what that warm look, present, in a way, on the first day already, in dark eyes has meant.

He still doesn’t quite understand, but Nasir looks at him like he is a fool when he finally spills the truth of his life like grains of salt, and he does feel like one then.

 

 

 

 

He beats Barca on the training ground in the camp the very next day, and the Beast of Carthage sits on the ground for several minutes blinking in shock while Crixus roars with laughter and Naevia and Nasir and Spartacus cheer for Pietros.

“I did not hurt you too badly, I hope?” he asks, and hopes he sounds teasing and indifferent and sincere, and not unsure and terrified of what this might mean, of what Barca will decide next.

Barca has a laugh like a mountain, and he only gets to his knees, tall enough to reach for Pietros hands and pull him down on the ground with him, and then their teeth clash together as he kisses him, Barca still laughing when he pulls away again: his body shakes as he buries his face in the soft spot where Pietros’ neck meets his shoulder, and then he sighs. 

“I am unhurt,” Barca tells him, warm breath ghosting over his skin, arms wrapping around Pietros’ waist and holding him close.

Pietros has never before understood that Barca is here because he loves him, but he thinks he does now. Looking back on his life from he was sent to the _ludus_ and now, it is as if it has happened so fast, without thought almost, the way they had fallen into each other.

“I wish to be with you always,” Pietros says, because he feels free to say this now, and Barca laughs again and says, _yes._

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Jordan, who wanted Barca and Pietros surviving and joining the Rebellion, Pietros learning how to fight (not to mention kicking Barca's ass), and a good dose of Pietros/Naevia/Nasir friendship. Mira slipped in a lot more than I intended to, but I love her too much to help it really. I hope you liked it, dear!
> 
> Title from Anaïs Mitchell's _'Hey, Little Songbird'_


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